-*You had to know that wuss would kill Han Solo. This isn't the first time a shield had to be taken down by Han Solo and Chewbacca. I liked Rae as a character but Finn was kind of a wuss too and he couldn't use a light saber to save 9h8ims*ef/f*/ (that's my cat typing there...) I liked the fighter pilot. Rogue One was great because it had Donnie Yen using the force in it. Story was good but sad ending.

I loved the Droid in Rogue One. The female lead was WAY more relatable than the one in Force Awakens. I LOVED the Force Monk. A guy who ISN'T a Jedi but still BELIEVES in the force. That's such a cool idea.

p.s. Allegro's e-mails send spoiler text straight into your e-mail.

-----sig:“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

I enjoyed Force Awakens for the spectacles, but it did little for me in terms of story. Things felt too contrived; there were too many conveniences, which felt cheap. I also didn't like the new characters.

As for Rogue One, it was "grittier", which I appreciated. I enjoyed it a lot more than Force Awakens. I just hope they do a decent job moving forward with episodes 8 and 9 (screw Roman numerals, by the way).

EditI should mention that my viewing experience of Force Awakens was lessened because someone had spoiled the bigger plot points for me before I saw it.

I watched it when it first came out. I'm not a big SW fan so I couldn't really care less about the franchise, but I think I generally didn't like the movie. I can't remember my criticisms, but in any case I think I managed to sit through it all. As more of a Star Trek fan I find that the Star Wars media tends to seem rather low budget and random, even if they managed to spend tens of millions on its production. It just seems amateurish like they started hacking at a script without knowing how it was going to end. It probably helps that most Star Trek media is in the format of 40 minute TV episodes instead of feature length films, but they do have their share of those too (which admittedly I haven't seen many of them).

I wasn't expecting much of that movie and therefore wasn't let down or overtly impressed. There were some good moments though. The crashlanding on the imperial outpost and what was going on after that felt a lot like first missions in Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast, I liked the humour involving the droid.

However, it too was suffering from the syndrome introduced in Force Awakens - jumping between systems felt very fast. It was like: "hey we need a bombing mission on the other side of the galaxy", "sure no problem, ETA 5 minutes." I also disliked how they portrayed the Rebels as a bunch of cowards.

And don't even get me started about the final battle and the very quick tie in to the New Hope movie. It's like the introduction scene from that movie follows literally 5 minutes later which feels really cheap and out of place. Plus the CGI Grand Moff Tarkin...

It all looks like someone sat down with a cool idea about a movie depicting the effort to obtain Death Star plans (already done in the first mission of Dark Forces by the way) and how a large number of Bothan spies died in the process. And then trying really hard to tie it in as a prequel for the New Hope. I mean it didn't need to be so bloody obvious, we would get it. And the end for the lead characters? Well, I don't mind but it felt so cheap, come on!

[My website][CppReference][Pixelate][Allegators worldwide][Who's online]"Final Fantasy XIV, I feel that anything I could say will be repeating myself, so I'm just gonna express my feelings with a strangled noise from the back of my throat. Graaarghhhh..." - Yahtzee"Uhm... this is a.cc. Did you honestly think this thread WOULDN'T be derailed and ruined?" - BAF"You can discuss it, you can dislike it, you can disagree with it, but that's all what you can do with it"

Wow, I am constantly surprised at the criticisms of these movies. You question their ability to travel long distances in the blink of an eye but nobody questions how they are walking around their ships with full gravity and no inertia from movement etc... etc...

I guess I'm different. I go to see a movie, I don't expect realism. I expect... a movie... fiction. I can't think of anything that I didn't like.

I loved the ending where

the one base commander uncovered what the rebels were after and why and how the other one (I am bad remembering names) ends up destroying the base, commander and all. Destroying the rebels, but also killing the commander who could have warned them about what the rebels were up to.

There is a bit of a difference between artificial gravity and super-speed.

Firstly, weightlessness is cool, but also hard to do well on a set with gravity, and expensive to try to make work. That can be forgiven. I don't think it would be practical to do this live actors for an entire feature length film (at least, not one with action and space battles, etc.).

Super-speed is always achieved with special effects or CGI so there's no technical excuse for it. And going faster than possible is actually harder to produce than slower. The main complaint about crossing extreme expanses in seconds is that we know it to be physically impossible (short of some kind of wormhole or bending space phenomenon). The galaxy is 100,000 lightyears across. Traveling at the theoretical maximum speed would take 100,000 years! Sort of a leap from 30 seconds.

Of course, this rule needs to be broken somewhat to achieve a story as well. It doesn't need to be completely thrown away though. They could invent a technology that can manage to bend it, but still take several hours or days or weeks to get where you're going. Star Trek does this, and I don't think too many people get upset about their speeds because it's not completely ridiculous.

Personally I don't remember what speeds were reached in Rogue One. It sounds vaguely familiar that I was annoyed with the distances traveled, but I honestly can't remember. I'm just speaking to the specific point that you brought up.

As for expecting fiction, of course, everybody going to see a fictional movie is expecting fiction. And each fictional universe can set its own rules. That's absolutely true, and desired. It's only a problem when the rules set out in that universe are bent or broken without explanation.

I don't know that Star Wars is particularly guilty of this, but again I'm not a fan so I haven't seen nor do I remember many films. Again, I'm just refuting the argument that anything goes because it's a movie. That's not true. A movie is very easily ruined if the ending bends the rules and nullifies the entire conflict of the story, for example.

Often this bending of rules makes the conflict (or minor-conflicts throughout the movie) not actually a problem because you can just workaround the problem as if it never existed. There's no point watching something where literally anything goes.

Take the most tense moment in film history, impossible odds, how are we going to get out of this. Don't worry, we just did. Because. How fun? No, completely boring. That's like watching a sporting even where at any moment a team can win the entire match by snapping their fingers or getting lucky or something else ridiculous. What would be the point of playing or watching the game if the entire premise can be compromised in the blink of an eye? All of the hard work of the opposing team for nothing. Nobody would want to watch that. That is what watching a movie that doesn't obey its own laws is like.

It's like the introduction scene from that movie follows literally 5 minutes later which feels really cheap and out of place. Plus the CGI Grand Moff Tarkin...

The tie in at the VERY end did feel really rushed. Plus, Darth Vader while everyone thought he was super cool... the continuity didn't make sense. He's super super angry in this movie and swinging and force choking everyone. And then we begin A New Hope and... he's so much more calculating and reserved. And I think that was kind of the point. A Sith MASTER uses the dark side but isn't controlled by his emotions. Whereas a Sith new recruit is overwhelmed by them ala Kylo Ren (even though Ren is supposed to be a master or whatever which is also B.S.). But at the end of Rogue One, Darth Vader is like some crazy murderfest guy... which is fine if you want that but... then a New Hope hits and he's TALKING to people, interrogating prisoners. He's creepy BECAUSE he's so reserved.

Also, if he can force pull people, why the hell not force pull the ONE guy with the damn deathstar plans?

The tie-in at the end was silly and forced. (Ha. Pun.)

That being said, I loved the rest of the movie. It did feel like they spend very little time at each spot BUT contrast it with Force Awakens where they just go from one planet to the next and SIT AROUND AND TALK. Every place just spends 5 minutes of fan service without actually propelling the movie forward. There were like 10 minutes of ORIGINAL content in Force Awakens of new, cool ideas. In Rogue One there's at LEAST an hour.

New service droids and the reprogrammed one that feels like C3-PO meets . VERY Cool.

Space Muslims. Cool.

Force Monks. Very freakin Cool.

MORE SHIPS. Great space battles. (Unlike the Force Awakens Tie-Fighter / X-Wing battle which is literally just background effects while the characters do stuff. The X-wings "win" and then magically lose somehow and allow Kylo Ren's ship to leave.)

Seamless hyper-transport. (The very end where they're retreating and then Darth Vaders ship WARPS INTO IT destroying it?)

NEW SHIPS that feel canon and look right. YES.

Pushing one destroyer into another. Mwahaha.

Explaining why the Death Star had such an obvious defect? Neat. I didn't ask for it, but it's a "plausible" reason and not some horribly obvious tacked on handling. It felt canon.

Death Star using 1 generator instead of full power? A neat special effect that ends up having a PRACTICAL plot effect. They're worried the Death Star might not run at full power, and then the obvious--I don't want to mention--part. Excellent use of a new concept twice. It the movie didn't feel like we were just being "shown" a bad thing, and then the second time "feel" the bad thing. Both times felt pretty natural.

I loved the grittyness of the film. You saw camera angles that George would NEVER use like the handicam shots.

(spoiler...Ish)

I REALLY liked the characters that "seemed" like bad guys / traitors but didn't end up being. How the one "good" guy rebel was a pretty dark asshole assassin.

If you saw the movie you'd know what I'm talking about. A guy who ISN'T a Jedi. He CAN'T wield a lightsaber or use the force... except he can use hints from the force because he is such a strong BELIEVER in the force. Like a wizard in Harry Potter. You either are or aren't. But what if you were such a studied muggle that you could "kind of" use a wand.

The point about the Rebels is a good one. HOWEVER, it wasn't the rebels that were cowards. I REALLY liked how they showed that the rebels were TIRED. They were fighting for so long and (NEAT) did unethical things "For the greater good."

ALSO, the COSTUMES. They were new AND FELT NORMAL. Way more than Force Awakens (though it's set in the future, yeah... but not that far.) The new Imperial general clothes, cloaks, etc. It all felt normal and GREAT. (Although the Sith's Temple or whatever... looked WAY too much like Mordor...)

It was so damn stupid. It took all of the real fear of a cold, calculated Empire and replaced them with silly Westboro Baptist Neo Nazis.

I also liked the bad general dude. He was slightly cliche but he had SOME depth. I liked his "too eager to suck up to get ahead" attitude. He felt like some Wall Street jerk in the Empire attracted to money and power, and once he got high enough in rank he ended clashing against something different than bureaucracy and greed... the cold calculating evil of the Sith. A completely different motivation behind their actions.

- ANOTHER good thing. When they're getting attacked on the planet and all the Empire guys just stand around and the white general dude is like "DO SOMETHING!" That's a REAL feeling scene. Everyone is so shocked that anyone would dare attack them, they're stunned, and then the bureaucracy is so powerful that nobody knows who to call or what to do when a real situation happens.

The TWO unforgivable parts in the movie?

- SAYING THE NAME OF THE MOVIE and calling attention to it. WTF. It took you right out of the movie and made you THINK about the fact you were watching a movie. ROOKIE. DAMN. MISTAKE.

I forgot to complete my thought about the rebels. The rebel LEADERS were hesitant to engage in an operation that would cause many losses and may not actually help their cause. So I don't really count them as cowards.

Also, WTF: Look at all the cool scenes they ripped from the movie we saw: (Scroll down to near the bottom for the "dialog cut from movie" video.)

Notice the FREAKING TIE FIGHTER floating up when she goes to walk out to the "align the dish" switch at 2:15 mark. Maybe she shoots the guy in the cockpit? It would have made that trip to the switch WAY more interesting instead of "tacked on" that it felt like.

"HEY GUYS, ANOTHER SWITCH YOU GOTTA PUSH because the writers said so."

The other switch was so silly too. The one the force monk and his buddy die trying to turn on. There are X-WINGS flying over head and you're pinned down in a doorway? You can't call for X-wings to drop a bomb on those black storm troopers?

-----sig:“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

You question their ability to travel long distances in the blink of an eye but nobody questions how they are walking around their ships with full gravity and no inertia from movement etc... etc...

Well, it wasn't meant like this. As bamccaig put it, some things wouldn't be fun or practical to shoot, unless you are Stanley Kubrick My point was rather at the fact that in the New Hope it takes them quite long to jump from Tatooine to Aldebaran and we actually get to watch what they do on board of Millenium Falcon while in transit. Sure, subsequently they started to cut things because there wasn't important stuff to be shown.

However, both in Force Awakens and in Rogue One it felt really rushed up. And the whole thing with the whole Republic being smashed by a single shot from the "New Death Star", that was such a shortcut that I was really pissed off. I mean before the empire the Galactic Republic was spanning the whole galaxy or at least a vast majority. It was superceded by the Empire and after it felt, again the Republic was established. You don't want to tell me that it was just a single planet and several moons neatly together to simply vaporize them with a new superweapon. That was like super rushed and I got the same feeling from the rest of the movie.

The point about the Rebels is a good one. HOWEVER, it wasn't the rebels that were cowards. I REALLY liked how they showed that the rebels were TIRED. They were fighting for so long and (NEAT) did unethical things "For the greater good."

Yeah, right, they were tired, I forgot that. Maybe I just can't express myself very well on this. The thing is they felt completely different from the Rebels you get to watch literally 5 minutes after the end of this movie and in Empire Strikes Back. Their behaviour felt totally out of place.

Don't get me wrong, I kinda liked both movies, especially audiovisually. But storywise, well, I liked Rogue One more as it was grittier. Yet, again, just as it was actually cool to think about the Clone wars as Obi Wan uttered a mention about them in the New Hope it was a let down to see them portrayed in the second trilogy. So, in my opinion, same goes for the theft of the Death Star plans.

[My website][CppReference][Pixelate][Allegators worldwide][Who's online]"Final Fantasy XIV, I feel that anything I could say will be repeating myself, so I'm just gonna express my feelings with a strangled noise from the back of my throat. Graaarghhhh..." - Yahtzee"Uhm... this is a.cc. Did you honestly think this thread WOULDN'T be derailed and ruined?" - BAF"You can discuss it, you can dislike it, you can disagree with it, but that's all what you can do with it"

That reminds me of another thing I hated about Force Awakens. The Super Death Star (Star killer?) was such a stupid thing.

Building TWO death stars in the series was almost insane. "Hey guys, we build this MOON sized ship... TWICE. With the SAME flaw in it." By time you hit Jedi. BUT, they changed it up because it was till being built. Which was kind of cool.

Force Awakens... they build a THIRD DAMN DEATH STAR? I MEAN COME THE HELL ON. .. And it's got ANOTHER critical weakness... A THIRD TIME? They're really stretching credibility here. It's straight up comical at this point, like some insane silly James Bond villain. "OH NO, here's comes Dr Evil with his THIRD LAIR of DOOM!" Or like a comic book villian, "Here's comes X, trying to take over the world again with his robot minions! However will we defeat him, team?"

Okay... but... the LAST two could also do that... they just had to fly around for five minutes for each one. WHO CARES if an entire galaxy, an entire civilization blows up in 30 seconds, or 30 minutes?! WHO CARES?! Compared to the thousands of years they existed on those planets?

And how can ANY of us possibly comprehend and empathize with an entire civilization dying? How can any of us wrap out heads around it? It's a horrible plot device. A human brain can't comprehend it, so why the hell is it in the movie? Am I supposed to be sad everyone is dead? And if not, why the hell are you showing me it? (Just like what Disney did in Tron: Legacy where they killed all the synthetic people... but never showed them. All you heard was cheesy death sounds. Am I supposed to care about these people that live in a computer that I've never heard about before?)

Moreover, if they were gonna go the "Empire are just neo nazis" route, it would have been a THOUSAND times more heartfelt and impactful if they did ACTUAL Nazi stuff instead of "POLITICALLY CORRECT NAZI" stuff. Actual torture chambers. Actual interment camps. Actual genocide. THAT would have been intense. Not this White Washed, PC, version of Space Nazis where they would never torture you... but they'll blow up your entire galaxy (including ALL the important resources/documents/armies alongside it? REALLY?). Taking Scorched Earth policy to a whole new level there...

And why blow up the Republic anyway? Couldn't they have just THREATENED them with the new doom laser and extorted them into gaining resources, power, influence, slaves, whatever. It just doesn't make sense.

When the USA got nukes, they didn't blow up entire countries off the face of the Earth. They dropped TWO BOMBS. Enough to get the point across so they could then extort/influence the country to their whims.

How many potential new Storm Troopers could they have enslaved from those planets they blew up? It's SILLY.

And just as a movie device, GOOD GOD. "Hey guys, it's a death star... but this one is... BIGGER." Has got to be the laziest plot device for a SciFi movie in the history of movies. Look at Tremors 1, 2, 3, etc. Even though the 2nd onward are cheap B-movies, the movie revolves around prehistoric worms. BUT, each movie had NEW evolutions of those worms. The 2nd one, they could walk and see heat (while the 1st movie was vibrations ala Dune). The 3rd one had jetpack "butt buster" ones. And so on. NONE of those movies did "Hey, it's a worm... but it's a BIGGER WORM!!! OMGAWWD". If you can't beat a SciFi channel B-movie, what the hell are you doing with your career? Would you have watched Star Trek 1/2/3 if they were just Wrath of Kahn (good movie!) but... BIGGER WRATH OF KAHN SHIP. And the next one... BIGGER WRATH OF KAHN SHIP! ("But this time Kahn IS A ROBOT!") Hell no you wouldn't.

Rogue One felt like a narrative. The characters were just a part of a bigger story going on. Force Awakens felt like the opposite. It felt like the WORLD bent to whatever the characters (::cough:: writers ::cough::) needed to happen so that these characters could go through a list of "cool scenes". It was like Family Guy. And I mean that seriously. The writing for Family Guy is extremely lazy. I'll never forget the South Park creators talking to film students saying:

"What we've learned makes a good story is, you never have 'this happens' AND 'this happens'. You want to do 'this happens' BUT 'this happens' BECAUSE 'this happens'. Use BUT and BECAUSE. If you have this AND this AND this, it ends up boring."

Family Guy is SUPER like "this AND this AND this." Peter discovers X, then Y shows up under the carpet, then Z happens. There's no real struggle, suspense or twists. Even the "twists" in Family Guy are all just tacked on, for the same of a list of jokes they want to say. And Force Awakens felt like a bunch of tacked on bullet points of neat scenes that barely fit together in any natural way, and only link because the writers deemed that they should.

I mean, the millennium falcon JUST so happened to be sitting on the first planet AND it just so happened to be fueled and ready to fly? REALLY? ... REEALLLY? In the original New Hope movie where the ship is introduced they remark how "old" and "piece of junk" the ship is. So this 100+ year old ship is both faster and more powerful then contemporary ships AND ready to fly?

Pacific Rim's "Big robots punch Godzilla" felt better put together and had me cheering way more than Force Awakens. (Though I did cheer on Rogue One at some badass stuff.)

-----sig:“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

This is getting intense. But I generally agree, the story was very poorly written. And considering it's a franchise that goes away for years at a time I think it was a pretty big let down for the people that give a crap.

I personally know people that paid extra to watch it on the special release night thingamabobber, at least locally, and the show was canceled because of a snow storm. And it was sold out for days afterward. I'm not sure how or if the theater ever made it up to them. Can you imagine?

I wouldn't consider myself to be much of a Star Wars nerd, although I have watched all the movies so I watched Force Awakens and Rogue One mainly due to curiosity more than anything.

When I walked out of the cinema after watching The Force Awakens, I remember feeling satisfied that it at least felt like a Star Wars movie (unlike Episode 1,2 and 3). Then after further reflection I was disappointed when I realized it's 'familiar' feeling was basically because it was just a carbon copy of Episode 4.

I felt like Rogue One was a much better movie. I didn't realize that the actor that played Moff Tarkin had kicked the bucket until about halfway through the movie when there was a particularly bad scene of him. If they would have kept him in dimmer lit areas I might never have noticed he was CGI'd at all.

================================================= Paul whoknows: Why is this thread still open?Onewing: Because it is a pthread: a thread for me to pee on.

I'm 22. I wasn't alive to see the original trilogy while it was new, though they were the first I saw as a child. But I personally prefer episodes 1-3 over 4-6, as they are more nostalgic for me, and I enjoyed the CGI. Yeah, much of it hasn't aged well, and lots of the dialogue is cheesy, but I still enjoy it. Besides, the light saber fights are way better in the prequel trilogy, and there's plenty of cheesy acting in the originals, too.

But hey, each to their own.

I'm just hoping that things improve moving forward with episodes 8 and 9. My expectations aren't too high though. I enjoyed the Star Trek movie reboot thing a from a few years ago, for example, but hated the sequel (rehashing the Khan story but in a crappy fashion felt cheap and disrespectful to the original movies). I thought the third movie would bring things back to good standing, but I was even more so disappointed with that one. So I have very little expectations from JJ and Star Wars.

It seems that a lot of sequels are garbage these days. They used to almost always be garbage, but in the mid 2000s, things seemed to be a bit brighter for a time. But now it's back to garbage. Or maybe sequels have always sucked, but I was just blind to it? Just like they're rebooting King Kong again! I saw the trailer the other day and thought, "didn't I they just remake that?" But then I realized that was 12 years ago! Man, how time flies... I just don't see a reason to remake/reboot these things so quickly (if at all ever). I've recently felt the same way with video game sequels, too. Animal Crossing from the GameCube era, for example, is more than enough for me. I bought the first two sequels, but felt they were not as good as the original. I recently tried the third sequel was was really disappointed. Kind of bummed me out. So screw sequels, I guess...

I think that sequels can be good, but it's rare the the writing is done well, or that the money is available. I think that production companies see sequels as an easy way to make money. Which is really shitty business, IMO, which might have something to do with the rental and ownership business going down the toilet. When odds are a movie is going to suck who cares anymore?

Oh, and I also liked episode 1, 2 and 3. I really think people are far too critical.

Some people were making good points that Force Awakens really highlighted how overly critical we were of George Lucas and how much we shat on him. Don't get me wrong, I'm not "super" impressed with the prequels with lines like "You are softer than sand... m'lady" (was he wearing a fedora?) and MITICHLORIANS RETCONNING the entire series.

HOWEVER. As much as "Star Wars Prequels" didn't feel... exactly like Star Wars. (Read: Force Awakens being so conservative its afraid to do anything at all) It sure as hell felt like SOMETHING NEW. It was so new that it didn't exactly feel like Star Wars so much as "in the universe of Star Wars". But George sure as hell put a lot of effort into it.

(Fun fact: Tons of the original SCRAPPED ideas for Star Wars New Hope that producers/etc ripped out of his movie for being too silly or stupid ended up in the prequels. Almost like he was like "SCREW YOU. Those WERE good ideas damn it!")

So I'm still on the fence about the prequels. One thing I remember as a kid, being MOST interested in was ... "How did Darth Vader become Darth Vader?" the coolest bad guy in fiction ever created. And then the prequels hit and I was like "Wait, so he's just a whiny bitch?" and then the prequels ENDED the moment he turns into vader! We never got to actually SEE Anakin BECOME Vader. We just saw him turn to the dark side and get the suit. All of that I didn't care about... I wanted to see young vader WITH the suit, encountering stuff and becoming more and more of the badass we see in the originals. What missions did he go on? What things did he see? To me, the prequels were set at least 10 years too early. I was hoping George was going to give us info about vader that would enhance the words we saw in the original series. Pick a random line, say, "You are apart of the rebel alliance and a traitor." and then we find out he was referencing a very specific event in his history that fueled his emotions and actions. (We did get a slight hint/taste of that with Rogue One.)

-----sig:“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

I dunno, I guess I just don't go over movies with a fine tooth comb like that. <shrug>

I felt the story in the prequels was needed. Jar Jar was a tad silly at times, but I got a laugh from it when it first came out. But if you wanted a story about Darth Vader, than you really needed those movies the way they were. I recall people whining about there being a love story and I was like "What?!" You NEEDED a love story, one where he was REALLY, deeply in love with her in order for him to go so bad when she died. Being a married man (32 years now) who once threw his doctor across the room for making his wife cry, I totally understand that aspect.

I dunno... I just haven't seen a Star Wars I didn't like. Some more than others, the Ewoks felt a little like a Muppets show but... meh, just a movie, so I rolled with it.